Developing a Checklist for Evaluating Research Articles in Applied Linguistics

Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous pressure to publish or perish, there exist few widely acknowledged rating scales or checklists for evaluating manuscripts submitted to journals in applied linguistics. To top it all, the existent peer-reviewing criteria are typically not publicly shared; thus, peer-reviewing is a closed, occluded genre. To fill this lacuna in applied linguistics, this research critically analyzed the evaluation scales, existing review criteria, and available documents from 18 journals, two publishing institutions, and APA guidelines in order to come up with a comprehensive checklist for evaluating research articles in applied linguistics. The analysis of the data through inductive content analysis revealed 43 categories, which were later classified under six main themes. It was found that researchers must be aware of the practicalities of research, include the essentials in their manuscript, and appeal to editors by adding elements of face validity. Having met these requirements, researchers must enjoy excellent composition skills and adhere to the fundamental principles in research ethics in order to be able to write a research paper having high overall value. The paper concludes with several implications for researchers and opens up some avenues for future research.